Thread: The Power of Present-Moment Awareness

Recently I've been reading a lot of threads that stress the importance in having a very strong present-moment awareness and paying attention to the often overlooked details during waking life... Most notably KingYoshi's tutorial about All Day Awareness (ADA). I have noticed something in common with nearly all of the people that post these threads about having a very high awareness, which is that they all report GREAT SUCCESS WITH A VERY HIGH LUCID DREAM COUNT. Immediately after noticing this trend (only a couple days ago), I started practicing KingYoshi's technique with great care... At first, it was a little difficult and overwhelming trying to pay attention to the significance of every single aspect of my body, such as what I am doing with my hands/fingers and why, paying attention to blinking and even more importantly breathing, the feeling of my feet pushing into the cushions of my shoes with every step, etc... But as I continue to concentrate on trying to have a powerful awareness, it is starting to happen more naturally, and it is starting to feel like more of a lifestyle that I feel I need to engage in for the rest of my life... Not just for Lucid dreaming, but for myself... I am the kind of person that often has my head down, looking at the gravel as I walk, kind of zoning out into thoughts and worries, and completely missing the world in front of me. Since practicing this technique, I have been more engaged with my environment and the people around me, I have embraced the entirety of long walks from place to place on my campus that usually feel like a burden, and I simply feel more in touch with the world around me. I have also not felt a single ounce of the daily anxiousness that I normally feel when I let myself slip into thought about both the past, and upcoming events of the future that would normally have me extremely stressed. To put it simply, this isn't just a fantastic technique to become lucid, this is a lifestyle change that will drastically improve the quality of anyone's life. A good attitude to have when practicing this method is that there is no past and no future, but only the present moment.


Now onto the lucid dreaming part.

I am not the least bit surprised that living this all-day-awareness technique yields such a strong impact on people's efforts to achieve lucidity. I remember reading on someone's thread something along the lines of ''You will dream lucidly if you live lucidly,'' and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense, because we really do seem to 'sleepwalk' our lives away when we get lost in things such as T.V or the internet.. Now I'm not shunning these things or even discouraging them, but since practicing this technique it has become SO clear just how distracting these things can be to our senses. But with practice, we can have a natural awareness while doing these things. As I lay here in my bed, in the darkness, thinking about what I am going to type on my laptop gently resting on my chest, I watch myself in a passive awareness while my eyes seem to effortlessly dart between my screen and the pin-point locations on the keyboard where my fingers must land in order to form a coherent message, all while feeling the rhythm of my breath, the air gently traveling in and out of my nose. I am not getting lost in my computer screen, which usually feels like it completely envelopes my vision, but I have this sense of the peripheral space of blackness around the screen, as well as the platform under the screen where my fingers do their dance on the keyboard, as i focus my main attention on the letters appearing on the screen. I hear my fridge humming a sound familiar to isochronic tones, as i feel my lower body, my legs and feet dormant and sinking into the bed.

Now, if we can train ourselves to have this sense of awareness at every single moment during the day, wouldn't it only make sense for this sense of awareness to gradually transfer into our awareness during the dream state? Well, like I said, I've only been practicing this method for two days, and this morning I woke up from a very noticeably more vivid dream than usual... I could remember specific physical feelings from my dream almost at a fully conscious level upon awakening, which is very uncommon for me.

I don't have too much success with LD'ing currently, and have only had 4 Lucid's in my lifetime... But I am feeling REEEAAALLY good about this technique, and I have been growing this very confident sense of expectation to have a lucid dream within the next week. Anyone wanna share thoughts about this?

One thing I forgot to mention too is that I often had problems remembering to do reality checks, and since practicing this method I have been remembering and performing the nose plug reality check almost automatically, and every time I see something strange I genuinely stop and question reality, which is definitely a very critical component to the process.